Türkiye's military spending rebounded in 2023 to grow by 37% year-over-year, a leading think tank on conflict and defense said Monday.
The country's expenditure reached $15.8 billion (TL 513.67 billion), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, said. That compared to $10.6 billion in 2022, which marked a third straight annual drop.
As international peace and security deteriorated, global military spending grew 7% to $2.43 trillion in 2023, the steepest annual rise since 2009, SIPRI said.
SIPRI's new report showed that the 2023 spending lifted Türkiye by one place to rank 22nd in the world.
The nation's expenditures climbed 59% between 2014 and 2023.
According to the report, Türkiye allocated 1.5% of its gross domestic product (GDP) to military spending last year, compared to 1.15% in 2022.
The country accounted for about 0.6% of the global military spending in 2023, according to SIPRI data.
Years of investments have fueled a profound transformation in Türkiye's defense industry over the last two decades, spurred by a score of Western embargoes.
The drive has aimed at reducing external dependency on Western arms through innovative engineering initiatives and domestically developed technologies.
It prompted the development of a range of homegrown air, land and marine platforms, eventually helping lower Türkiye's foreign dependency on defense from around 80% in the early 2000s to about 20% today.
The ground covered since 2002 has reached a level where Türkiye sells more than 230 defense products to about 170 countries.
The exports reached a record of $5.5 billion in 2023.
The United States, China and Russia were the top military spenders in 2023, according to SIPRI.
Russia raised spending by 24% to an estimated $109 billion. Ukraine increased spending by 51% to $65 billion and received at least $35 billion in military aid from other countries.
"Combined, this aid and Ukraine's own military spending were equivalent to about 91% of Russian spending," the think-tank said.
It said NATO member countries' spending totaled $1341 billion, or 55% of the world's expenditure.
"For European NATO states, the past two years of war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed the security outlook," SIPRI researcher Lorenzo Scarazzato said.
"This shift in threat perceptions is reflected in growing shares of GDP being directed toward military spending, with the NATO target of 2% increasingly being seen as a baseline rather than a threshold to reach."
NATO member states are expected to allocate at least 2% of their GDP to the alliance's defense expenditures.
SIPRI said most European NATO members had boosted such spending.
Their combined share of the NATO total was 28%, the highest in a decade, said SIPRI.
The remaining 4% came from Canada and Türkiye.
The U.S. raised it by 2.3% to $916 billion, representing around two-thirds of total NATO military spending.
